Citrix PVS 7.6 Install – Part 9: Preparing for Production use

This is part 9 in the Citrix Provisioning Services 7.6 installation and configuration guide. In this article we be making the final changes to the image in order to convert it into Share Mode to be used in production. We will also be repurposing the capture VM into a standard target device.

Step-by-Step Guide

We have now completed the PVS image and it is ready to be used in a production type environment. When I say that I essentially mean in Shared Mode or read-only mode which means that it can be streamed to multple PVS target devices at the simultaneously. In addition, we no longer need the capture VM, so we will be converting it into a standard PVS target device. We can use this VM as a template to deploy other target devices from. To complete these tasks, follow these steps:

1. At this point the Capture VM (i.e. WP-CTXAPP-V02) should be in a powered off state.

2. From the vSphere Client, Edit Settings of the VM

3. Select the System hard disk (C:\) and deleted it

This disk is no longer required, as the system disk is streamed from the PVS server. The only disk we need is the secondary disk (D:\) as it will contain all of the files that we want to remain persistent for that server.

4. The VM settings should now look like this (only one hard drive of 10GB left)

We can now use this VM as a clone or a template and provision as many PVS devices as required. At this point, you can convert this VM into a vSphere Template so that you can easily create new PVS Target Device VMs. Alternatively you can use this VM as one of your PVS Target Devices and when you need more just power it off and clone it to create new PVS target devices. In this guide, I am going with option 2 as in a test lab environment I am not going to be deploying more than two PVS target devices.

6. From the PVS console, navigate to the PVS store that contains the image

In this example the PVS store is called PVS_Store

7. Right-click on the captures image and select Properties

8. From the vDisk Properties window, change the access mode from Private Image to Standard Image

9. From the same window, change the Cache Type to "Cache in device RAM with overflow on hard disk"

10. Set the maximum amount of RAM on the device that will be used as a write-cache

Note: Depending on what your PVS image is being used for, you may want to set this more than 1GB. I only used 1GB as this is a test lab environment and has no actual work load. In reality you may want to configure this to be something more like 4- 8GB. In the event that you do, you will also then need to ensure that each PVS target device VM has enough RAM allocated to it.

The amount of RAM allocated should be the amount used for cache PLUS the amount you want to the PVS target device streamed operating system to use. For example, if you are using 4GB for the write-cache and you want the OS to also be able to use 4GB then the amount of memory configured on the PVS target device VM should be 8GB.

Dear Luca, as per your this Article i followed proper steps from 1 – 12, when I came to step 13 my VM failed to reboot saying “No Bootable drives been found or no OS…” As I am Deploying this Lab on Xenserver 6.5 not on VMware vSphere. Please do assist.

I have tried a few step-by-steps for PVS and yours is the easiest to follow. One step which another site had was going into the system tray, right-clicking on the Virtual Disk and clicking Virtual Disk Status. This will verify the vDisk mode which in this case after step 13 should read “Mode: vDisk: Read Only, Cache Type: device RAM with Overflow on local hard drive”

Thanks for writing such a wonderful article on PVS installation & configuration.

I have a question about setting up the Maximum RAM size on vdisk property Window.

In our environment we have assigned 8GB of RAM on each persistent vdi machine. For cached drive we have have assigned 8 GB of disk space, however if we go to PVS server and check the RAM size on vDisk property Window it is set to only 256 MB and I believe due to this users face issues while installing heavy softwares and the cached drive of there VDI gets full and the machine got stuck.

Kindly provide some more understanding on how to determine the “Maximum RAM size(MBs)” on vdisk property Window.